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WASHINGTON -- Several U.S. Supreme Court justices adopted a skeptical tone yesterday about whether an Indiana law requiring voters to produce photo identification is unconstitutionally unfair and burdensome.

Other justices wondered during an hour-long oral argument whether Indiana had taken enough steps to ensure that indigent voters and others lacking photo ID weren't disenfranchised.

But none of the justices questioned a state's right to require that voters offer some form of identification at the polling place to guard against election fraud.

"You want us to invalidate a statute on the ground that it's a minor inconvenience to a small percentage of voters?" asked Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, often a swing vote on the court, in the argument's final minutes. Earlier, he had seemed open to the possibility of scaling back Indiana's requirement.

The precise fate of Indiana's law, arguably the strictest voter-identification mandate in the nation, won't be decided until this summer. But that is early enough to have an effect on the 2008 election.

Judging from the justices' remarks yesterday, the outcome wouldn't seem likely to impinge on Ohio's voter-identification law, which says voters must bring an accepted form of ID to the polling place. The Ohio requirement allows a photo ID such as a driver's license, as well as documents such as a bank statement or utility bill.

"Only an outlier like Indiana could be in trouble," said election law expert Edward B. Foley, an Ohio State University law professor who attended the Supreme Court session. "Ohio is safer."

Foley said Ohio's law could, however, be subject to future challenge based on an argument that it is enforced in an unequal fashion.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner joined chief elections officials in four states in filing a friend of the court brief opposing Indiana's photo ID requirement. She said in an interview that she wouldn't want Ohio's law to impose any more "onerous" requirements on voters.

The partisan nature of the Indiana case was highlighted, as Justice Antonin Scalia questioned as soon as the argument began whether one of the plaintiffs against the Indiana law, the Indiana Democratic Party, had legal standing to bring the suit. The law was pushed through by Republicans.

The Bush administration is backing the Indiana law, and one of the attorneys arguing in favor of the measure was U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement.

Justice John Paul Stevens told Clement that it seemed fair to conclude that Democrats were unduly harmed by the law, since many of their voters were poor, indigent and more likely to lack photo ID.

Clement said it would have been hard to tell that the 2005 law negatively affected Democrats in their mostly successful 2006 campaigns.

Meanwhile, Justice David H. Souter asked Indiana Solicitor General Thomas M. Fisher whether the state's case revolved around having to toughen voter ID requirements to make up for its own failures to overhaul registration rolls bloated with the names of dead people and those who have long since moved out of Indiana.

Paul Smith, a Washington attorney representing the law's opponents, said voters lacking photo ID must overcome substantial practical and financial burdens before they can continue to exercise their constitutional right.

Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said perhaps the state should be required to take photos of people who register and then provide those photos at the time of registration so they can be used when voting. Ginsburg suggested providing the ability to give affidavits as to one's identity at the local polling places.

She told the Indiana solicitor general it seemed certain that indigent people without photo ID would be unduly burdened by the law.

But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Scalia and Samuel Alito seemed skeptical about whether there is evidence of harm to voters from the Indiana law. On the other hand, there was the real possibility of fraud because of the disrepair of the Indiana voter rolls, Roberts said.

Alito noted that a federal commission on election reform headed by former President Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, called for a voter-identification law nationally.

Smith responded that the commission also had called for a phasing in of voter ID cards to make sure no one was disenfranchised.

"Well, why would they even require that if it's not any problem at all?" Alito asked.